The basic exercises

A General comment about training

Always put a premium on form. This ensures not merely that you are using the right muscles but that
any load is properly distributed. As alluded to elsewhere, part of getting this to work is
getting your central nervous system capable of handling all the stabilization it needs to and
prepare muscles for handing off loads as you move through a large range of motion. If this gets
out of whack you can get hurt. What's more, many of the bodyweight exercises will have you in a
full or partial inversion (head near the floor) where losing control means you hit your head on
the floor with your bodyweight behind it. Being macho here is being dumb. A lot of weightlifters
can make the "no pain no gain" mantra because there just isn't much of a downside to failure.
Simply being
able to, say, bench press your bodyweight is no guarantee you have
enough strength in your deltoids to try a horizontal
dip and you might find yourself seriously airborn if you aren't careful.

Never work to failure. Your muscles will get re-used and might actually fail.

Have daily goals. If you are learning some exercise, get the form right and do
just a couple reps with perfect form. Then rest for some time and try a couple more.
Continue until you reach your goal or your form degrades. After a few sessions of this, you
will find it much easier to hit your goal. Then try for three in a row. Continue adding a
rep ever so often until you can do 10 reps. More than 10 reps means you are working on endurance,
i.e., training the muscle to recover so it can work again at the same load (physiologically
you are growing more mitochondria). This might
just eat up your practice time without much in the way of payback.
Seriously, 10 handstand pushups are great, but there is something
wrong with your martial art if you need to have enough endurance to do 50 of those in
a row.

Oh, sometimes people ask me about using medicine balls for training. These are really good,
but don't go get a big one. Something in the range of 2 - 3 kg (so about 10 lbs. is the absolute top limit)
is good. You want to get one specifically designed for throwing and play catch with various tosses
off a concrete wall. This lets you really develop speed, power and the ability to receive and impact.
Folks usally get a really heavy one, which means you can't move it fast enough to get much
benefit, or they toss them back and forth to each other, which you have to do pretty slowly or
you'll blast the other person of their feet and probably injure them if their timing is off. In short,
sure, get one and use it if you like, but do it right.